What is Clockwise?
Clockwise is clear in their focus on helping teams find focus time. This means that if you're an individual, or a small team that doesn't have many internal meetings, Clockwise is not right for you.
If the main goal that you have is getting your team to have all of their internal meetings optimized to give everyone a calendar that is optimized for focused time blocks, that's exactly where Clockwise excels.
The piece that is most confusing to me when using Clockwise is that they have a "planner", which looks like a calendar:
Clockwise planner (not a calendar replacement)
But when you actually dive in to use it, you realize that it has no actual calendaring functionality. While it allows you to create a one-off event, you can't even edit after creating it—it's literally read only. So there's no editing the title/description, adding additional guests, etc. you'll have to go to a separate calendar app like Google Calendar to make any of these changes.
What it does allow you to do is tag existing events (sort of like an over-encompassing category of the event), update internal meetings as "flexible"—AKA you're allowing Clockwise to reschedule them automatically, and manually reschedule meetings to others based on some recommended schedule times:
Meeting reschedule recommendations
This is all fine, it's just something that I continually get frustrated by when using these time management tools. Just like Reclaim, it's essentially requiring you to either keep Clockwise open in another tab, or you're restricted to using Google Calendar along with the Clockwise Chrome extension.
So this is where you need to essentially forego using a modern calendar app in favor of using Clockwise properly (or you need to have both apps open side-by-side).
Key Features
Clockwise touts AIÂ for time management/scheduling, and it seems they've actually gone a bit more true to this than that of Reclaim. They've done this by incorporating a ChatGPT-like interface for which you can speak to in-place of a scheduling assistant.
They claim you can use it for things like "I need to meet with our CTO immediately", which will then suggest some shifts in both your calendars, and then you can move forward with it.
The only question IÂ have here is, should everyone at the company really be able to have that level of control? To be able to switch around team member's calendar to prioritize a meeting with you? There's definitely areas where this would be cool and impressive, I'll admit, it's just I wonder how much actual usage this will get on the day-to-day, versus it just being a really cool AI demo type of feature.
Competition
Clockwise fits in as the most focused specifically on re-arranging internal team meetings, to optimize chunks of focus time for teams. This means, if you're using Clockwise solo, or with a small team (or just don't have that many internal meetings), the value in which you'll get from it won't be all that high.
This is where we're more a fan of time management tools that also have task management baked in at the core, because really, what is time management without tasks?
While a tool like Motion will actually fit in tasks that need to be done during your focus blocks of time, Clockwise is more about trying to find you and your team focus blocks of time.
Clockwise also just reschedules meetings and focused time blocks once a day, whereas both Motion and Reclaim react to changes on your calendar immediately.
Rescheduling runs once-a-day
We find it generally difficult to recommend Clockwise if customers actually have any meaningful scheduler needs though, as something like Motion or Calendly allows for far greater control in adding more opinionated parameters around the booking link. Like in Motion, since it also manager your tasks, you can set a scheduler link to be higher priority in that it'll actually book over scheduled tasks, and even over scheduled events (if you wanted a high-priority link set).
